Scott McCloud is no longer that guy. His first graphic novel, The Sculptor, is out, it's already a success, there's a Scott Rudin film on the way, and most importantly, it's good. The Sculptor is the beautifully blue-toned story of a struggling artist given the power to sculpt anything, but he has to do so in 200 days, before he dies. The book becomes a race to the finish line with the reader rooting for protagonist David Smith to grow up before his time runs out. It's an intensely personal story told well and, in an era in which a new superhero movie gets announced every month, it's refreshing to see that this particular read is getting notice. As McCloud says, comic books were never only about pumped-up showdowns in tights, anyway: "That was always a niche market that just happened to be our only bread and butter for many years. We need to build a mainstream from scratch."

By "mainstream," McCloud is referring to creating more readable and engaging comics in all genres, and developing more readers who know about the artistically enterprising comics already on the market (i.e., the sort that don't have a Saturday morning cartoon spin-off). To that end, we invited Scott McCloud to pick his favorite moments in modern comics, and to explain how they show off what the medium can offer a multitude of audiences. Here are six of the best scenes from modern graphic novels, plus McCloud's own single proudest moment from his new book The Sculptor.
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By Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli (adapted from Paul Auster's City of Glass)

Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli

What's happening on pages 62-63:

After following an old man for a few days, an amateur detective discovers a peculiar pattern.

Images communicate in a way that can be secret, that can be mysterious, that can be unappreciated.

Why the moment works:

"City of Glass is unique among comic adaptations because it doesn't just illustrate text, but it embodies it in a way that only comics could. I particularly like this scene where our accidental detective is following this old man as he walks through the city and realizes that the man, with his steps, has been tracing the shapes of letters and writing a sentence every day. Or gradually, over the course of several days, writing a sentence. That's emblematic of the entire project [of adapting Paul Auster's novel City of Glass to this form], because here what we're saying is that images have meaning, too. Images are text. Images communicate in a way that can be secret, that can be mysterious, that can be unappreciated. Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, and also Art Spiegelman, who was involved in the project, I think that they fully understood that, and if you start to tease apart this whole book, you see that everything from the panel shapes and structure to the individual symbols to the way in which the story progresses and the—all of these things have a meaning far beyond your average comic storytelling.

"A lot of people have great respect for this book in my community, even if it's not necessarily well-known outside it. Paul Karasik started with four panels—a two-by-two grid. David Mazzucchelli had to adapt it to a three grid, so it's really astonishing that they were able to pull off everything that they did."

A young man—after promising his first girlfriend that he would never leave her—falls asleep next to her on a winter night.

"He started with a blank page, decided to represent a sensation or an emotion, found nothing in all of comics' history that would quite do, and had to roll his own."

Why the moment works:

"I think a lot of people looking at Blankets get hung up on the over-arching narrative. For me the significance of the book is that it's a treasure trove of newly constructed or reconstituted techniques for portraying things that comics rarely even attempt to portray. A good example of that is what's happening on pages 432 through 435. Especially those last two where he's diving very deeply into the realm of the abstract and embracing the picture plane, all for the purpose of trying to represent a nearly impossible representational challenge: the sensation of a cold winter's night, in a warm, safe place, listening to the sound of your lover breathing. And trying to discern the spiritual texture in the room as if you're given a moment to momentarily glimpse another dimension of what's always right there but rarely visible. And then having the balls to show us just, like, these pond ripples and paisley patterns, and at the bottom of 435, it looks like diatoms, those tiny, microscopic things that I loved as a kid.

"There is no way to rationally explain any one of those choices except to say that while reading the story, it completely captures that sense of euphoria that we're a little bit more capable of experiencing when we're in our teenage years or early 20s. I remember that feeling. Especially after sex, actually. (Although, in this case he hasn't actually had sex yet at this point, but there is sort of the prompt there.)

"There are dozens of parts of this book where he started with a blank page, decided to represent a sensation or an emotion, found nothing in all of comics' history that would quite do, and had to roll his own."

Upon learning from a friend that the boy she had kissed earlier had baseball practice despite telling her he'd meet her after school, seventh-grade Callie rushes to the field to search for him.

"If somebody has a change of emotional state, you need to portray that step by step."

Why the moment works:

"Something that Raina understands, and a number of the other people working in the all-ages category understand (but very few people in mainstream comics did when I was growing up) is that emotion is action. We tend to think of emotion as embellishing or filling out a character so the character can then get on to jumping over walls or punching people, but if somebody has a change of emotional state, you need to portray that change of emotional state step by step. And that means a panel for each one.

"I read this book only a couple of years ago, and I remember being transported into the place of being one of her actual readers, one of her young readers. Look at the right-hand page where she's got her back to the audience. It's instructive that in decades of mainstream comics when I was growing up, characters never turned their back to you. Go back and look in 60 years of superhero comics. They're always facing a little bit toward the audience. They don't give you the opportunity to enter the story through the panel. They're always blocking you with the window. But she wants you to participate emotionally. That partially comes out of the manga generation. It also just comes out of a kind of emotional wisdom that I think is beginning to kick in with a new generation of creators."

An unemployed artist in New York, living in squalor, very literally throws himself into his politically inflammatory work.

"It's an especially bracing moment when the literal world, in a symbolic flourish, begins to encroach."

Why the moment works:

"I love the way in which the literal world of this character is clearly based on the artist, Eric Drooker. It's his literal world: the Lower East Side back in the early '90s. Things were a bit grittier. When that literal world is fairly intolerable, difficult, and demoralizing, the role of fantasy becomes increasingly important.

"He uses the symbol of the blue ink to show that fictional world—the world of what he's drawing. And it's an especially bracing moment when the literal world outside, in a symbolic flourish, begins to encroach on his world, and he can no longer keep out what's happening around him. The idea of escape becomes impossible. The use of the blue ink mixing with the water as a way of showing the real and the fantasy worlds mixing is a really great way of showing also an artist with a strong political conscience sort of judging himself for hiding. Judging himself as unable to shut out the suffering of the world. It's just a really nice spread, too.

"One of the keys to Flood is to go back to the things that inspired it. These early 20th-century woodcut novels. By Frans Masereel or Lynd Ward. These were in many ways some of the early 20th century graphic novels, except they were all silent and they were all done in a very symbolic way. They tended to have strong moral lessons or political messages. A lot of that is echoed in what Drooker is doing. Art's relationship to society is a very slippery idea. It's one with a lot of fuzzy edges. On the one hand, it's the highest calling to respond to the outside world with your art and on the other hand it's the highest calling to shut out the outside world and not let it shape or change your art. He's showing that tension very nicely."

In a 12-page story, a ferryman takes passengers across a river when he notices that all of them are carrying mysterious, moving sacks.

"This single, pitiless eye. That's no accident."

Why the story works:

"It is the odd man out, I suppose, because here— I mean, there's always an interior landscape—but I think here it's the interior landscape of the reader, maybe. It's the only one we can really point to, and that is the way in which we respond to the unseen. She's kind of in that cartoonist's cartoonist category. One of the things that continually makes me happy about it is the way that she takes the process of filling in the blanks for the reader, which is the mechanics of how comics tell their stories—we live with this as a mechanical necessity as cartoonists.

"When he asks 'What's in the sack?'—which really is the fundamental question of the story and one that as readers we think we have an answer to; we just don't really want to think about it—she makes sure that the character who answers has a mask on. And so we have that tension between what that character says, 'Rabbits,' and what we see, which is nothing. We cannot depend on any emotional information whatsoever from the face. You just have this single, pitiless eye. That's no accident. It's no accident that we have this big, bloated, good-natured brute who weighs down the boat, but when another creature three times the size of that character boards the boat, the boat doesn't dip at all. And we can see these wispy bits of smoke coming off of it, because in the order in which they cross the river, Davis is gradually delivering different pieces of information and this is that piece of information that tells us the depths to which we've delved into the other world.... I think it's a near-perfect story."

A man relates the story of sitting in a library near the end of the day and watching the sunset.

"When the introduction of a new instrument comes in, it's fucking colossal."

Why the moment works:

"The lead-in is very important. He starts [in previous pages] with his oddball, quotidian phone conversation and then in the telling of the story…it starts out very slow. I think what he's doing is basically he's giving you the tool kit to read the rest of the story. First we have to establish non-linearity. And he does that in a very simple way just by showing something dull and everyday and presenting it in an order that we're not accustomed to. We have to adjust to that before we can adjust to the next thing. Before we can adjust to a change of point of view, a change from one person to the next, a change from one place to the next, a change from one time to the next. He's giving us all of these things one at a time because that's what we can swallow. And once he's done that, now we have a platform from which to jump out.

"Like drum and bass: You might go eight minutes in a song by Underworld without a key change, right? But what's happening is you're setting the stage of expectations in a kind of baseline so that when that key change happens, or when the introduction of a new instrument comes in, it's fucking colossal.

"The thing that I think really blew a lot of people away is that it illuminated the infinite possibilities of the rearrangement of moments. I had written in Understanding Comics about the way in which we chose our moments to tell stories. There's a sense of flexibility in how few or how many, but there was always in that lesson the presupposition that you were still telling a linear story, that there was a natural order. You could tell a story in three panels or in 30 panels or in 300 panels, but panel one and the last panel would always be the same panels.

"What Kevin does in 'The Sunset' is remind us there are moments within moments, and that there are different dimensions of linearity that our minds are capable of grasping. That there are levels of consciousness that rarely make it onto the pages of comics. He's reaching for something that actually exists. He's illuminating a level of perception that's no less real than the one we usually live in. Like he stepped up a dimension. Like we're living in flat land and he just stepped up to the third dimension, and we don't understand why we're suddenly seeing this weird cross-section. But then he reaches down and pulls us up. For me, it feels no less real. It feels like he's not just putting drawings on paper, but he is confronting us with what a tiny fraction of perception we usually exist within.

"Every once in a while you get a comic that becomes a touchstone for a particular generation. I think this is one for artists of a certain age and a certain aesthetic predisposition. You never know when one is going to come along."

(Note: This is a minor spoiler for his new book, so if you haven't read it, proceed with caution!)

"Just a tiny, little exchange toward the end."

Scott McCloud

What would you say your proudest moment or scene is in the book itself? What do you think, looking back now, that you totally got right?

"Nobody's asked me this, but I actually have an answer. This is probably typical of a lot of creative people, but I think the thing I'm proudest of in the book is the thing that people are least likely to notice and that's just a tiny, little exchange toward the end of the book.... When he says 'it doesn't matter,' what he means is none of it matters anymore. This is near the end of the story and then he's going to die soon, and this is his, like, he's saying it on the grandest possible scale, 'cause he's saying it doesn't matter. And, of course, the other person just says, 'It does to a Ukrainian.' They were on a completely different frequency. And I really like it when characters are on different frequencies. When you have this sense that every single character in a story is living in their own universe and every one of them is the star of their own story. It really helps to understand that when you're writing characters, there are no supporting characters. Everyone is the star. It just depends on whose head you're in at the time.

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